Alumni Magazine - Summer 2008 - (Page 62) Journalism 2.0 hile the Internet is changing the way in which the public receives news, the underlying computational technologies are fundamentally transforming the very definitions of both news stories and journalists. Online interactivity along with the ability to link video, audio, graphics and text together in an infinitely large space are even changing what it means to be a story, according to Aaron Bobick, chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. “A story can be an active,” he says. “A story can put itself together or add some of its own components. A story can talk about points of view that go into making that story. You no longer have to think of it as a single crafted entity — and that means it starts to have computational issues; it becomes a computational ‘thing.’” The application of the Internet’s multifaceted ways of communicating information carries implications for journalism, he adds. Bobick’s remarks were delivered during the opening session of a symposium on computation and journalism held earlier this year at the Technology Square Research Building. The two-day event, sponsored by the College of Computing and the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, drew a capacity audience of 230 writers, computer scientists and media entrepreneurs from California to New York. “Journalism has a lot to do with telling stories,” says Irfan Essa, a College of Computing associate professor and the main organizer of the event. “A lot of us have been working for a long time on telling stories with new media.” The combination seemed a natural fit, according to Essa, in light of the technology-driven challenges facing the news business, “so it occurred to us that we need to bring together journalists and the people who do computation.” A technological institution like Georgia Tech W Traditional media is fast becoming as obsolete as 35millimeter film, VHS and pay phones By Gary Goettling Photos: Gary Meek and Rob Felt may seem an unlikely forum for a conference devoted to journalism, but it follows the mandate of the GVU Center and the School of Interactive Computing, Essa says. “One of the most important things we do is try to understand how technology impacts people and society,” he explains. “Journalism is a perfect example of something that impacts society and consumers and is also changing very quickly with technology. We wanted to begin educating ourselves so that whatever happens down the road, we are ready to deal with it and adapt to it.” News from Everywhere eynote speaker Krishna Bharat, PhD CS 96, talked about one of the best-known examples of the marriage between technology and journalism: Google News, which he started about seven years ago and continues to be involved in as one of Google’s principal scientists. The site’s goal, he says, is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The completely automated Google News service relies on intelligent algorithms to select the top news headlines from thousands of online, English-language sources around the world in real time, Bharat explains. The system determines the relative importance of a story based on factors including the number of times the story’s topic appears in the news and the reputations of the sites on which it appears. The list of headlines and one-line summaries displayed by Google News are links to the full articles themselves, and links to many other news sources on the topic are also displayed. These links to additional, often contrasting and unfiltered perspectives on the news are valuable features, Bharat says, “because knowing what other people believe matters.” “When readers are exposed to different viewpoints,” he adds, “people start thinking, analyz- K “You no longer have to think of a [news story] as a single crafted entity — and that means it starts to have computational issues.” — Aaron Bobick 62 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2008
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